Dimitri Larmuseau, host of the Sourcetrunk podcast, recently took FreeNAS 8-RC5 for a test drive. The result is a 40 minute review (not counting the first 4 minutes where he discusses beer) that is available in MP3 and OGG formats at the Sourcetrunk website.

FreeNAS 8 documentation is a work in progress and is steadily moving along. The documentation has been moved from the old wiki to a new wiki which can be accessed from the Documentation page of the website. Please update your bookmarks accordingly and point people to the new location as the old one is now stale.

At the moment, the 8.0 Guide is fairly usable as it contains screenshots for each GUI menu and tables for each configurable option (most of which have some sort of description). This provides a framework to start with but it still definitely needs contributions to fill out the “when” to do something, provide more understanding of how various services work, usage tips, and real-world scenarios with configuration examples. If you would like to contribute to an area that you have expertise in, create a wiki login and add your writeup. Don’t worry if your English or writing ability is not perfect; we get an email for every edit and can clean up contributions for readability and technical accuracy.

Once the official FreeNAS artwork is available, a version of the FreeNAS 8.0 Guide will be “published” in various formats (PDF, epub, kindle, html). The plan is to release an updated version of the Guide with each version of FreeNAS moving forward. As the documentation matures, the “released” Guide will match the features that came with that release and the wiki version will be considered the “CURRENT/HEAD” area for updating the documentation to reflect the features being added to the next release.

We’re still working on configuring and testing the translation plugin for Mediawiki. If you have experience configuring this extension for another project and can help out, definitely let us know as we could use your help! In theory, this extension lets translators know when the English version is modified so that they can translate the new material.

In the mean time, the translation plan is as follows: once the timeline for 8.1 release is known, a documentation freeze date will be included. The wiki will be “frozen” (meaning all changes will be ignored until after release) to give time for translators to translate and for the published version to be formatted and converted to various formats in time for release.

Are you interested in seeing the menus in the FreeNAS 8 graphical administrative interface localized to your native language? If so, we are looking for translators!

A Pootle server has been setup for FreeNAS 8 localization and all of the text strings have been imported into the server. Pootle is an easy way to find out the status of a language’s localization and provides an easy to use translation editor that can be accessed from any browser.

You’ll find the FreeNAS 8 Pootle server here. There is a page in the FreeNAS 8.0 Guide to get you started on localization. A translators mailing list has also been created; if you’re interested in helping out with localization, subscribe to that list so you can interact with other translators.

Recent Comments

Yep, we have split FreeNAS 10 into multiple components parts largely to make it MUCH easier to hack on. You can now hack on the GUI straight from your Unix system or Mac, in fact, without even *having* a FreeNAS box

It seems like a lot of folks are unaware that you can still create a UFS filesystem (newfs is not going away at the command-line) and, for that matter, can create a ZFS pool on a single disk if you just want to be able to import that disk as a pool, copy data to it, and then export it again as part of your backup strategy?